


The Color of Humanity

by snowlikestardust



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Colors, I may come back to this I may not, I'll just leave it as a single chapter for now though, empath!Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 11:28:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10763334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowlikestardust/pseuds/snowlikestardust
Summary: Harry Potter lived in an ordinary neighborhood. In said ordinary neighborhood there lived ordinary neighbors with ordinary jobs and ordinary children. Harry Potter was not ordinary.





	The Color of Humanity

Harry Potter lived in an ordinary neighborhood. In said ordinary neighborhood there lived ordinary neighbors with ordinary jobs and ordinary children. Harry Potter was not ordinary.

He was a speck of dirt on the otherwise ordinary masterpiece that made up Privet Drive. That speck of dirt happened to live in number four, with his aunt, uncle, and cousin.

Harry didn’t like his relatives very much. They were sickly. The colors swirling around them were nasty green greed, rusty disdain, dirty black hate. It was like they were constantly going swimming in a polluted lake.

Harry had noticed that their colors got uglier whenever he was around, so he did his best to never be around. When he was not doing chores, he was sitting in the park watching strangers. Harry loved people watching. Seeing the swirl of colors twisting among them was beautiful.

“There you are freak! Thought you could get away from us did you?”

Harry’s cousin, Dudley, and Dudley’s gang didn’t have pretty colors. 

“What are you doing just watching us? You’re such a freak.”

But they could make pretty colors bloom across Harry’s skin. Reds and blues and greens, all there for everyone to see. No one but Harry could see people’s colors. But everyone could see bruises and cuts. They hurt, yeah. But at least with them people could see a bit of the color inside of him (Harry liked to think that the colors of bruises were the real feelings of people begging to come out).

“Haha, get ‘im Piers! Show the freak who’s boss.”

Harry liked when colors came from people. He didn’t like paint or colored pencils as much though. They didn’t seem real enough for him, and seeing colors anywhere else than on people and in the sky seemed strange. 

“Come on Potter, react. Show how much this really hurts you.”

For this reason Harry didn’t get along with his art teacher very well. Usually she swirled with light pinks and yellows, but when she talked to Harry they turned to reds and blacks. Harry didn’t try very hard in art.

“Man Dudley, your cousin is broken. He’s such a freak that he can’t even talk.”

Harry didn’t do well in any of his classes. He always got distracted by other people’s colors. Whenever they talked to him they went sour, so he had to watch their interactions with others to see real beauty.

“This is getting boring. Let’s leave.” A chorus of agreements, and Harry was left alone with stinging pain and blooming color all over his body. Despite himself, Harry smiled.

\--------------

Harry liked zoos, he decided. The animals didn’t have colors like humans did, so he didn’t get as much of a headache as he usually did. 

At this particular excursion, Harry didn’t have any bruises on him. Dudley and his gang seemed to have lost interest within the past couple of years chasing after someone who didn’t react to anything.

The animals Harry liked the most of all were the snakes. He found himself relating to them. There were signs saying not to tap on the glass, but people were anyway. Harry felt like that sometimes. He just didn’t even have a sign in the first place.

Another reason he found the snakes interesting was because they were different from all of the other animals in one crucial way: they had colors. Faint ones, their aura was small, but still there. Harry could see the Corn Snake was hungry and the Tree Boa was annoyed. Simple emotions, so much more simple that humans’, but there nonetheless. Harry wondered why snakes were different, and if it was because of the snakes or him that caused the difference.

Ah well, Harry thought. It didn’t matter all that much. He was more interested in the joke the python was telling.

\--------------

Whoever was sending all this mail, Harry thought, was very emotional. While sending all these letters they must have been feeling some very high emotions indeed, for the residue of the emotions had clung to the letters. Yellow-green excitement, orangy-pink fun, blue-green curiosity…

Harry had never been so close to such emotions. It was amazing.

Still. It was a bit irritating that the letters were making his family’s mood even worse that usual.

 

\--------------  
Harry Potter was a wizard. He was wizard, that could cast spells and brew potions and go to a wizard school to learn magic.

Harry Potter was also an empath. Something he had researched in the bookshop he had visited, and found to be very, very rare. They were also very, very distrusted.

Harry decided it best to focus on the first, and do his best to ignore the second.

\--------------

 

Blaise Zabini was blue. Icy trendles danced around alongside wisps from the depths of the ocean, curling up his body like a vine.

Theodore “Theo” Nott was green. The kind of green you don’t see anywhere but in the deepest depths of the forest, dark and full of restrained life. Harry was curious what it would look like for Theo to let a little bit of that life go free.

Blaise and Theo were nice, and hardly stared at Harry’s scar at all. They talked to him, and explained things in the wizarding world. Harry could start to relax around them. It was nice.

\--------------

The Great Hall was large, and full to the brim with loud voices and even louder emotions. Excitement and nervousness skated around the edges of the room, racing around each other like old friends.

Harry took notice of the tables. Each one seemed to be divided between colors--both those that could be seen and those hidden. Harry wondered if they had an empath here to sort people. Blaise and Theo had mentioned the four houses, but neither knew how one was sorted into them.

One table shone with pinks and oranges. The next with blues and purples. The third with pearly whites and sandy-yellows. The last with deep greens and turquoise hues.

Harry wonders what his own colors were like; they were the only ones he couldn’t see. But, he supposed, he would be finding out soon enough.

\--------------

The people in Slytherin had nice colors. In fact, before entering the common room he had never seen such a beautiful array of blues and greens and everything in between. Harry could see how each person became a part of a bigger masterpiece here. He was blown away.

\--------------

There were a lot of interesting teachers at Hogwarts. All of whom Harry felt differently towards.

Harry loved visiting Hagrid. His colors filled everyone around him with a comforting warmth. 

Professor McGonagall’s colors were more orderly than any he had ever seen. They pressed into her skin tightly, yet still danced across her robes and skin. It was really cool in Harry’s mind to see colors that loved their owner so much that they always wanted to hug her.

Professor Sprout gave her emotions to her plants freely, letting the colors explore as far as they wish. Every living thing the Professor touched came away with a golden-bronze sprinkled over it. Walking into the Greenhouse was a sight to behold.

Professor Quirrell was black. Harry had never seen a human made entirely of black before. There was always something else. But not with him.

Professor Snape was green and brown and sorrowful. Harry couldn’t help but wonder what tragedy caused his potions teacher to have the colors of a moody fifteen year old.

\--------------

There was something in the Third Corridor. Harry really didn’t care what. He was more concerned about exams.

\--------------

Exams went well. Three students broke into the Third Floor Corridor, meeting You-Know-Who. Their colors were dimmer afterwards.

Gryffindor won the house cup. Slytherin won the Quidditch Cup though, so none of the upper years felt too compelled to cause bodily harm to anyone else.

That didn’t stop one of the sixth years from losing Slytherin 20 points for next term.

\--------------

Harry liked the wizarding world. The colors were bright, even if they did give him a headache sometimes. Magic was amazing. He had become friends with Blaise and Theo and two girls names Daphne and Tracey. Everything had turned out pretty well.


End file.
